There is a lot of points of view I am seeing, so just going to offer my own feedback as opposed to directly replying as some of these opinions are very strong.
From what I have seen playing the game so far, the PvP element is almost exclusively tied to the PvE one in that, in order to facilitate the PvP side of the game, people need to engage in PvE. Now I know that is not 100% exclusive as technically you can fight each other all day and some people will find that fun - but ultimately you get no rewards for doing that.
The rewards for PvP, sneaking up on ships, stealing their loot etc, require that the other party has loot to begin with and ultimately the only way for that to happen is for someone to engage and complete the PvE objectives, exploration, voyages etc.
What this means is you really want to have some kind of balance between the desire to PvP and the desire to PvE because if you remove one, the other stops happening. This is why safe zones or PvE only servers would break a lot of the expectations on gameplay and remove the risk.
The biggest issue I see at the moment in game is that there is tangible rewards for effort - or an equivalency of effort for PvP content, that is, you put in some effort camping, chasing or otherwise harrasing another boat and you have the chance to steal a lot of loot and get rewards. If you fail, however, the consequences are fairly non-existent.
On the other hand, if you engage in the PvE side of things, it is time consuming, relatively boring and you get no rewards unless you can fully complete it, so if you fail, you lose a lot of time as well as rewards.
This is skewing the balance of incentives heavily PvP. While PvP players may not have an issue with this and I can also see some validity to the argument of losing your treasure in such PvP events, people need to keep in mind that unless there is some tangible reward for PvE that does nto involved the potential for spending hours and getting no advancement at all, for the casual and typical gamer they simply will grow tired of and stop doing the PvE pretty much altogether.
If their was significantly more PvE content that would be rewarding to the casual player, you would get a lot more people out and about exploring which also opens up more opportunities for PvP. As it stands, the PvE content is so incredibly shallow and uninteresting that it is just not keeping the playerbase at large interested.
Less people playing PvE, less people to steal from and create opportunities for PvP.
From my own perspective, the PvE has so little content that is interesting that after the initial fun run I had, all I am doing at the moment is playing just long enought to complete a few voyages and hand in loot and tire of the game and leave. As I know I will lose everything if attacked, I am intentionally avoiding PvP as there is no point in playing the game for several hours to make no progress at all. My trial for XBox game pass runs out on Monday and I took that to trial the game. I do not see enough interesting gameplay to warranty paying the $100.00 (Australia) that the game is charging to buy it outright.
So while I see many people objecting to any kind of additional incentive to PvE, and I also am not sure myself on what the "best solution is", without some kind of change all I see happening is people stopping PvE or leaving altogether which in turn will reduce and cripple the PvP and that is not a good direction right now for a game that is two weeks post release.
